The Turning Point: New Hope for the Climate

It's time to accelerate the shift toward a low-carbon future

by Al Gore

JUNE 18, 2014

In
the struggle to solve the climate crisis, a powerful, largely unnoticed
shift is taking place. The forward journey for human civilization will
be difficult and dangerous, but it is now clear that we will ultimately
prevail. The only question is how quickly we can accelerate and complete
the transition to a low-carbon civilization. There will be many times
in the decades ahead when we will have to take care to guard against
despair, lest it become another form of denial, paralyzing action. It is
true that we have waited too long to avoid some serious damage to the
planetary ecosystem – some of it, unfortunately, irreversible. Yet the
truly catastrophic damages that have the potential for ending
civilization as we know it can still – almost certainly – be avoided.
Moreover, the pace of the changes already set in motion can still be
moderated significantly.

There is surprising – even shocking – good news: Our ability to
convert sunshine into usable energy has become much cheaper far more
rapidly than anyone had predicted. The cost of electricity from
photovoltaic, or PV, solar cells is now equal to or less than the cost
of electricity from other sources powering electric grids in at least 79
countries. By 2020 – as the scale of deployments grows and the costs
continue to decline – more than 80 percent of the world's people will
live in regions where solar will be competitive with electricity from
other sources.

No matter what the large carbon polluters and their ideological
allies say or do, in markets there is a huge difference between "more
expensive than" and "cheaper than." Not unlike the difference between 32
degrees and 33 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not just a difference of a
degree, it's the difference between a market that's frozen up and one
that's liquid. As a result, all over the world, the executives of
companies selling electricity generated from the burning of carbon-based
fuels (primarily from coal) are openly discussing their growing fears
of a "utility death spiral."

Germany, Europe's industrial powerhouse, where renewable subsidies
have been especially high, now generates 37 percent of its daily
electricity from wind and solar; and analysts predict that number will
rise to 50 percent by 2020. (Indeed, one day this year, renewables
created 74 percent of the nation's electricity!)

What's more, Germany's two largest coal-burning utilities have lost
56 percent of their value over the past four years, and the losses have
continued into the first half of 2014. And it's not just Germany. Last
year, the top 20 utilities throughout Europe reported losing half of
their value since 2008. According to the Swiss bank UBS, nine out of 10
European coal and gas plants are now losing money.

In the United States, where up to 49 percent of the new generating
capacity came from renewables in 2012, 166 coal-fired
electricity-generating plants have either closed or have announced they
are closing in the past four and a half years. An additional 183
proposed new coal plants have been canceled since 2005.

To be sure, some of these closings have been due to the substitution
of gas for coal, but the transition under way in both the American and
global energy markets is far more significant than one fossil fuel
replacing another. We are witnessing the beginning of a massive shift to
a new energy-distribution model – from the "central station"
utility-grid model that goes back to the 1880s to a "widely distributed"
model with rooftop solar cells, on-site and grid battery storage, and
microgrids.

The principal trade group representing U.S. electric utilities, the
Edison Electric Institute, has identified distributed generation as the
"largest near-term threat to the utility model." Last May, Barclays
downgraded the entirety of the U.S. electric sector, warning that "a
confluence of declining cost trends in distributed
solar­photovoltaic-power generation and residential­scale power storage
is likely to disrupt the status quo" and make utility investments less
attractive.

This year, Citigroup reported that the widespread belief that natural
gas – the supply of which has ballooned in the U.S. with the fracking
of shale gas – will continue to be the chosen alternative to coal is
mistaken, because it too will fall victim to the continuing decline in
the cost of solar and wind electricity. Significantly, the cost of
battery storage, long considered a barrier to the new electricity
system, has also been declining steadily – even before the introduction
of disruptive new battery technologies that are now in advanced
development. Along with the impressive gains of clean-energy programs in
the past decade, there have been similar improvements in our ability to
do more with less. Since 1980, the U.S. has reduced total energy
intensity by 49 percent.

It
is worth remembering this key fact about the supply of the basic
"fuel": Enough raw energy reaches the Earth from the sun in one hour to
equal all of the energy used by the entire world in a full year.

In poorer countries, where most of the world's people live and most
of the growth in energy use is occurring, photovoltaic electricity is
not so much displacing carbon-based energy as leapfrogging it
altogether. In his first days in office, the government of the newly
elected prime minister of India, Narendra Modi (who has authored an
e-book on global warming), announced a stunning plan to rely principally
upon photovoltaic energy in providing electricity to 400 million
Indians who currently do not have it. One of Modi's supporters, S.L.
Rao, the former utility regulator of India, added that the industry he
once oversaw "has reached a stage where either we change the whole
system quickly, or it will collapse."

Nor is India an outlier. Neighboring Bangladesh is installing
nearly two new rooftop PV systems every minute — making it the most
rapidly growing market for PVs in the world. In West and East Africa, solar-electric cells are beginning what is widely predicted to be a period of explosive growth.

At the turn of the 21st century, some scoffed at projections that the
world would be installing one gigawatt of new solar electricity per
year by 2010. That goal was exceeded 17 times over; last year it was
exceeded 39 times over; and this year the world is on pace to exceed
that benchmark as much as 55 times over. In May, China announced that by
2017, it would have the capacity to generate 70 gigawatts of
photovoltaic electricity. The state with by far the biggest amount of
wind energy is Texas, not historically known for its progressive energy
policies.

The cost of wind energy is also plummeting, having dropped 43 percent
in the United States since 2009 – making it now cheaper than coal for
new generating capacity. Though the downward cost curve is not quite as
steep as that for solar, the projections in 2000 for annual worldwide
wind deployments by the end of that decade were exceeded seven times
over, and are now more than 10 times that figure. In the United States
alone, nearly one-third of all new electricity-generating capacity in
the past five years has come from wind, and installed wind capacity in
the U.S. has increased more than fivefold since 2006.

For consumers, this good news may soon get even better. While the
cost of carbon­based energy continues to increase, the cost of solar
electricity has dropped by an average of 20 percent per year since 2010.
Some energy economists, including those who produced an authoritative
report this past spring for Bernstein Research, are now predicting
energy-price deflation as soon as the next decade.

For those (including me) who are surprised at the speed with which
this impending transition has been accelerating, there are precedents
that help explain it. Remember the first mobile-telephone handsets? I
do; as an inveterate "early adopter" of new technologies, I thought
those first huge, clunky cellphones were fun to use and looked cool
(they look silly now, of course). In 1980, a few years before I bought
one of the early models, AT&T conducted a global market study and
came to the conclusion that by the year 2000 there would be a market for
900,000 subscribers. They were not only wrong, they were way wrong: 109
million contracts were active in 2000. Barely a decade and a half
later, there are 6.8 billion globally. These parallels have certainly
caught the attention of the fossil-fuel industry and its investors:
Eighteen months ago, the Edison Electric Institute described the
floundering state of the once-proud landline-telephone companies as a
grim predictor of what may soon be their fate.

The
utilities are fighting back, of course, by using their wealth and the
entrenched political power they have built up over the past century. In
the United States, brothers Charles and David Koch, who run Koch
Industries, the second-largest privately owned corporation in the U.S.,
have secretively donated at least $70 million to a number of opaque
political organizations tasked with spreading disinformation about the
climate crisis and intimidating political candidates who dare to support
renewable energy or the pricing of carbon pollution.

They regularly repeat shopworn complaints about the inadequate,
intermittent and inconsistent subsidies that some governments have used
in an effort to speed up the deployment of renewables, while ignoring
the fact that global subsidies for carbon-based energy are 25 times
larger than global subsidies for renewables.

One of the most effective of the groups financed by the Koch brothers
and other carbon polluters is the American Legislative Exchange
Council, or ALEC, which grooms conservative state legislators throughout
the country to act as their agents in introducing legislation written
by utilities and carbon-fuel lobbyists in a desperate effort to slow, if
not stop, the transition to renewable energy.

The Kochs claim to act on principles of low taxation and minimal
regulation, but in their attempts to choke the development of
alternative energy, they have induced the recipients of their generous
campaign contributions to contradict these supposedly bedrock values,
pushing legislative and regulatory measures in 34 states to discourage
solar, or encourage carbon energy, or both. The most controversial of
their initiatives is focused on persuading state legislatures and
public-utility commissions to tax homeowners who install a PV solar cell
on their roofs, and to manipulate the byzantine utility laws and
regulations to penalize renewable energy in a variety of novel schemes.

The chief battleground in this war between the energy systems of the
past and future is our electrical grid. For more than a century, the
grid – along with the regulatory and legal framework governing it – has
been dominated by electric utilities and their centralized,
fossil-fuel-powered­ electricity-generation plants. But the rise of
distributed alternate energy sources allows consumers to participate in
the production of electricity through a policy called net metering. In
43 states, homeowners who install solar PV to systems on their rooftops
are permitted to sell electricity back into the grid when they generate
more than they need.

These policies have been crucial to the growth of solar power. But
net metering represents an existential threat to the future of electric
utilities, the so-called utility death spiral: As more consumers install
solar panels on their roofs, utilities will have to raise prices on
their remaining customers to recover the lost revenues. Those higher
rates will, in turn, drive more consumers to leave the utility system,
and so on.

But here is more good news: The Koch brothers are losing rather
badly. In Kansas, their home state, a poll by North Star Opinion
Research reported that 91 percent of registered voters support solar and
wind. Three-quarters supported stronger policy encouragement of
renewable energy, even if such policies raised their electricity bills.

In Georgia, the Atlanta Tea Party joined forces with the Sierra Club
to form a new organization called – wait for it – the Green Tea
Coalition, which promptly defeated a Koch-funded scheme to tax rooftop
solar panels.

Meanwhile, in Arizona, after the state's largest utility, an ALEC
member, asked the public-utility commission for a tax of up to $150 per
month for solar households, the opposition was fierce and
well-organized. A compromise was worked out – those households would be
charged just $5 per month – but Barry Goldwater Jr., the leader of a
newly formed organization called TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won't be
Killed), is fighting a new attempt to discourage rooftop solar in
Arizona. Characteristically, the Koch brothers and their allies have
been using secretive and deceptive funding in Arizona to run television
advertisements attacking "greedy" owners of rooftop solar panels – but
their effort has thus far backfired, as local journalists have exposed
the funding scam.

Even though the Koch-funded forces recently scored a partial (and
almost certainly temporary) victory in Ohio, where the legislature voted
to put a hold on the state's renewable-portfolio standard and study the
issue for two years, it's clear that the attack on solar energy is too
little, too late. Last year, the Edison Electric Institute warned the
utility industry that it had waited too long to respond to the sharp
cost declines and growing popularity of solar: "At the point when
utility investors become focused on these new risks and start to witness
significant customer- and earnings-erosion trends, they will respond to
these challenges. But, by then, it may be too late to repair the
utility business model."

The most seductive argument deployed by the Koch brothers and their
allies is that those who use rooftop solar electricity and benefit from
the net-metering policies are "free riders" – that is, they are
allegedly not paying their share of the maintenance costs for the
infrastructure of the old utility model, including the grid itself. This
deceptive message, especially when coupled with campaign contributions,
has persuaded some legislators to support the proposed new taxes on
solar panels.

But the argument ignores two important realities facing the electric
utilities: First, most of the excess solar electricity is supplied by
owners of solar cells during peak-load hours of the day, when the grid's
capacity is most stressed – thereby alleviating the pressure to add
expensive new coal- or gas-fired generating capacity. But here's the
rub: What saves money for their customers cuts into the growth of their
profits and depresses their stock prices. As is often the case, the real
conflict is between the public interest and the special interest.

The second reality ignored by the Koch brothers is the one they least
like to discuss, the one they spend so much money trying to obfuscate
with their hired "merchants of doubt." You want to talk about the uncompensated use of infrastructure? What about sewage infrastructure
for 98 million tons per day of gaseous, heat-trapping waste that is
daily released into our skies, threatening the future of human
civilization? Is it acceptable to use the thin shell of atmosphere
surrounding our planet as an open sewer? Free of charge? Really?

This,
after all, is the reason the climate crisis has become an existential
threat to the future of human civilization. Last April, the average CO2
concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere exceeded 400 parts-per-million
on a sustained basis for the first time in at least 800,000 years and
probably for the first time in at least 4.5 million years (a period that
was considerably warmer than at present).

According to a cautious analysis by the influential climate scientist
James Hansen, the accumulated man-made global-warming pollution already
built up in the Earth's atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy
every day as would be released by the explosion of 400,000
Hiroshima-class nuclear bombs. It's a big planet, but that's a lot of
energy.

And it is that heat energy that is giving the Earth a fever.
Denialists hate the "fever" metaphor, but as the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) pointed out this year,
"Just as a 1.4­degree-fever change would be seen as significant in a
child's body, a similar change in our Earth's temperature is also a
concern for human society."

Thirteen of the 14 hottest years ever measured with instruments have
occurred in this century. This is the 37th year in a row that has been
hotter than the 20th-century average. April was the 350th month in a row
hotter than the average in the preceding century. The past decade was
by far the warmest decade ever measured.

Many scientists expect the coming year could break all of these
records by a fair margin because of the extra boost from the anticipated
El Niño now gathering in the waters of the eastern Pacific. (The
effects of periodic El Niño events are likely to become stronger because
of global warming, and this one is projected by many scientists to be
stronger than average, perhaps on the scale of the epic El Niño of 1997
to 1998.)

The fast-growing number of extreme-weather events, connected to the
climate crisis, has already had a powerful impact on public attitudes
toward global warming. A clear majority of Americans now acknowledge
that man-made pollution is responsible. As the storms, floods, mudslides, droughts, fires and other catastrophes become ever more destructive,
the arcane discussions over how much of their extra-destructive force
should be attributed to global warming have become largely irrelevant.
The public at large feels it viscerally now. As Bob Dylan sang, "You
don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Besides, there is a simple difference between linear cause and effect
and systemic cause and effect. As one of the world's most-respected
atmospheric scientists, Kevin Trenberth, has said, "The environment in
which all storms form has changed owing to human activities."

For example, when Supertyphoon Haiyan crossed the Pacific toward the
Philippines last fall, the storm gained strength across seas that were
5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they used to be because of
greenhouse­gas pollution. As a result, Haiyan went from being merely
strong to being the most powerful and destructive ocean-based storm on
record to make landfall. Four million people were displaced (more than
twice as many as by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 10 years ago), and there
are still more than 2 million Haiyan refugees desperately trying to
rebuild their lives.

When Superstorm Sandy traversed the areas of the Atlantic Ocean
windward of New York and New Jersey in 2012, the water temperature was
nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. The extra convection energy
in those waters fed the storm and made the winds stronger than they
would otherwise have been. Moreover, the sea level was higher than it
used to be, elevated by the melting of ice in the frozen regions of the
Earth and the expanded volume of warmer ocean waters.

Five years earlier, denialists accused me of demagogic exaggeration in an animated scene in my documentary An Inconvenient Truth
that showed the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flooding into the 9/11
Ground Zero Memorial site. But in Sandy's wake, the Atlantic did in fact
flood Ground Zero – many years before scientists had expected that to
occur.

Similarly, the inundation of Miami Beach by rising sea levels has now
begun, and freshwater aquifers in low-lying areas from South Florida to
the Nile Delta to Bangladesh to Indochina are being invaded by
saltwater pushed upward by rising oceans. And of course, many low-lying
islands – not least in the Bay of Bengal – are in danger of disappearing
altogether. Where will the climate refugees go? Similarly, the
continued melting of mountain glaciers and snowpacks is, according to
the best scientists, already "affecting water supplies for as many as a
billion people around the world."

Just as the extreme-weather events we are now experiencing are
exactly the kind that were predicted by scientists decades ago, the
scientific community is now projecting far worse extreme-weather events
in the years to come. Eighty percent of the warming in the past 150
years (since the burning of carbon-based fuels gained momentum) has
occurred in the past few decades. And it is worth noting that the
previous scientific projections consistently low-balled the extent of
the global­warming consequences that later took place – for a variety of
reasons rooted in the culture of science that favor conservative
estimates of future effects.

In an effort to avoid these cultural biases, the AAAS noted this year
that not only are the impacts of the climate crisis "very likely to
become worse over the next 10 to 20 years and beyond," but "there is a
possibility that temperatures will rise much higher and impacts will be
much worse than expected. Moreover, as global temperature rises, the
risk increases that one or more important parts of the Earth's climate
system will experience changes that may be abrupt, unpredictable and
potentially irreversible, causing large damages and high costs."

Just weeks after that report, there was shock and, for some, a
temptation to despair when the startling news was released in May by
scientists at both NASA and the University of Washington that the
long-feared "collapse" of a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet is
not only under way but is also now "irreversible." Even as some labored
to understand what the word "collapse" implied about the suddenness with
which this catastrophe will ultimately unfold, it was the word
"irreversible" that had a deeper impact on the collective psyche.

Just as scientists 200 years ago could not comprehend the idea that
species had once lived on Earth and had subsequently become extinct, and
just as some people still find it hard to accept the fact that human
beings have become a sufficiently powerful force of nature to reshape
the ecological system of our planet, many – including some who had long
since accepted the truth about global warming – had difficulty coming to
grips with the stark new reality that one of the long-feared "tipping
points" had been crossed. And that, as a result, no matter what we do,
sea levels will rise by at least an additional three feet.

The uncertainty about how long the process will take (some of the
best ice scientists warn that a rise of 10 feet in this century cannot
be ruled out) did not change the irreversibility of the forces that we
have set in motion. But as Eric Rignot, the lead author of the NASA
study, pointed out in The Guardian, it's still imperative that
we take action: "Controlling climate warming may ultimately make a
difference not only about how fast West Antarctic ice will melt to sea,
but also whether other parts of Antarctica will take their turn."

The news about the irreversible collapse in West Antarctica caused
some to almost forget that only two months earlier, a similar startling
announcement had been made about the Greenland ice sheet. Scientists
found that the northeastern part of Greenland – long thought to be
resistant to melting – has in fact been losing more than 10 billion tons
of ice per year for the past decade, making 100 percent of Greenland
unstable and likely, as with West Antarctica, to contribute to
significantly more sea-level rise than scientists had previously
thought.

The
heating of the oceans not only melts the ice and makes hurricanes,
cyclones and typhoons more intense, it also evaporates around 2 trillion
gallons of additional water vapor into the skies above the U.S. The
warmer air holds more of this water vapor and carries it over the
landmasses, where it is funneled into land-based storms that are
releasing record downpours all over the world.

For example, an "April shower" came to Pensacola, Florida, this
spring, but it was a freak – another rainstorm on steroids: two feet of
rain in 26 hours. It broke all the records in the region, but as usual,
virtually no media outlets made the connection to global warming.
Similar "once in a thousand years" storms have been occurring regularly
in recent years all over the world, including in my hometown of
Nashville in May 2010.

All-time record flooding swamped large portions of England this
winter, submerging thousands of homes for more than six weeks. Massive
downpours hit Serbia and Bosnia this spring, causing flooding of
"biblical proportions" (a phrase now used so frequently in the Western
world that it has become almost a cliché) and thousands of landslides.
Torrential rains in Afghanistan in April triggered mudslides that killed
thousands of people – almost as many, according to relief
organizations, as all of the Afghans killed in the war there the
previous year.

In March, persistent rains triggered an unusually large mudslide in
Oso, Washington, killing more than 40 people. There are literally
hundreds of other examples of extreme rainfall occurring in recent years
in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania.

In the planet's drier regions, the same extra heat trapped in the
atmosphere by man-made global-warming pollution has also been driving
faster evaporation of soil moisture and causing record-breaking
droughts. As of this writing, 100 percent of California is in "severe,"
"extreme" or "exceptional" drought. Record fires are ravaging the
desiccated landscape. Experts now project that an increase of one degree
Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures will lead to as much as a
600-­percent increase in the median area burned by forest fires in some
areas of the American West – including large portions of Colorado. The
National Research Council has reported that fire season is two and a
half months longer than it was 30 years ago, and in California,
firefighters are saying that the season is now effectively year-round.

Drought has been intensifying in many other dry regions around the
world this year: Brazil, Indonesia, central and northwest Africa and
Madagascar, central and western Europe, the Middle East up to the
Caspian Sea and north of the Black Sea, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia,
Western Australia and New Zealand.

Syria is one of the countries that has been in the bull's-eye of climate change.
From 2006 to 2010, a historic drought destroyed 60 percent of the
country's farms and 80 percent of its livestock – driving a million
refugees from rural agricultural areas into cities already crowded with
the million refugees who had taken shelter there from the Iraq War. As
early as 2008, U.S. State Department cables quoted Syrian government
officials warning that the social and economic impacts of the drought
are "beyond our capacity as a country to deal with." Though the hellish
and ongoing civil war in Syria has multiple causes – including the
perfidy of the Assad government and the brutality on all sides – their
climate-related drought may have been the biggest underlying trigger for
the horror.

The U.S. military has taken notice of the strategic dangers inherent
in the climate crisis. Last March, a Pentagon advisory committee
described the climate crisis as a "catalyst for conflict" that may well
cause failures of governance and societal collapse. "In the past, the
thinking was that climate change multiplied the significance of a
situation," said retired Air Force Gen. Charles F. Wald. "Now we're
saying it's going to be a direct cause of instability."

Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright told the press, "For DOD, this is a
mission reality, not a political debate. The scientific forecast is for
more Arctic ice melt, more sea-level rise, more intense storms, more
flooding from storm surge and more drought." And in yet another forecast
difficult for congressional climate denialists to rebut, climate
experts advising the military have also warned that the world's largest
naval base, in Norfolk, Virginia, is likely to be inundated by rising
sea levels in the future.

And how did the Republican-dominated House of Representatives respond
to these grim warnings? By passing legislation seeking to prohibit the
Department of Defense from taking any action to prepare for the effects
of climate disruption.

There are so many knock-on consequences of the climate crisis that
listing them can be depressing – diseases spreading, crop yields
declining, more heat waves affecting vulnerable and elderly populations,
the disappearance of summer-ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, the
potential extinction of up to half of all the living species, and so
much more. And that in itself is a growing problem too, because when you
add it all up, it's no wonder that many feel a new inclination to
despair.

So, clearly, we will just have to gird ourselves for the difficult
challenges ahead. There is indeed, literally, light at the end of the
tunnel, but there is a tunnel, and we are well into it.

In
November 1936, Winston Churchill stood before the United Kingdom's
House of Commons and placed a period at the end of the misguided debate
over the nature of the "gathering storm" on the other side of the
English Channel: "Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest
warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. . . . The era of
procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience
of delays is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period
of consequences. . . . We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now."

Our civilization is confronting this existential challenge at a
moment in our historical development when our dominant global ideology –
democratic capitalism – has been failing us in important respects.

Democracy is accepted in theory by more people than ever before as
the best form of political organization, but it has been "hacked" by
large corporations (defined as "persons" by the Supreme Court) and
special interests corrupting the political system with obscene amounts
of money (defined as "speech" by the same court).

Capitalism, for its part, is accepted by more people than ever before
as a superior form of economic organization, but is – in its current
form – failing to measure and include the categories of "value" that are
most relevant to the solutions we need in order to respond to this
threatening crisis (clean air and water, safe food, a benign climate
balance, public goods like education and a greener infrastructure,
etc.).

Pressure for meaningful reform in democratic capitalism is beginning
to build powerfully. The progressive introduction of Internet-based
communication – social media, blogs, digital journalism – is laying the
foundation for the renewal of individual participation in democracy, and
the re-elevation of reason over wealth and power as the basis for
collective decision­making. And the growing levels of inequality
worldwide, combined with growing structural unemployment and more
frequent market disruptions (like the Great Recession), are building
support for reforms in capitalism.

Both waves of reform are still at an early stage, but once again,
Churchill's words inspire: "If you're going through hell, keep going."
And that is why it is all the more important to fully appreciate the
incredible opportunity for salvation that is now within our grasp. As
the satirical newspaper The Onion recently noted in one of its
trademark headlines: "Scientists Politely Remind World That Clean Energy
Technology Ready to Go Whenever."

We have the policy tools that can dramatically accelerate the
transition to clean energy that market forces will eventually produce at
a slower pace. The most important has long since been identified: We
have to put a price on carbon in our markets, and we need to eliminate
the massive subsidies that fuel the profligate emissions of
global-warming pollution.

We need to establish "green banks" that provide access to capital
investment necessary to develop renewable energy, sustainable
agriculture and forestry, an electrified transportation fleet, the
retrofitting of buildings to reduce wasteful energy consumption, and the
full integration of sustainability in the design and architecture of
cities and towns. While the burning of fossil fuels is the largest cause
of the climate crisis, deforestation and "factory farming" also play an
important role. Financial and technological approaches to addressing
these challenges are emerging, but we must continue to make progress in
converting to sustainable forestry and agriculture.

In order to accomplish these policy shifts, we must not only put a
price on carbon in markets, but also find a way to put a price on
climate denial in our politics. We already know the reforms that are
needed – and the political will to enact them is a renewable resource.
Yet the necessary renewal can only come from an awakened citizenry
empowered by a sense of urgency and emboldened with the courage to
reject despair and become active. Most importantly, now is the time to
support candidates who accept the reality of the climate crisis and are
genuinely working hard to solve it – and to bluntly tell candidates who
are not on board how much this issue matters to you. If you are willing
to summon the resolve to communicate that blunt message forcefully –
with dignity and absolute sincerity – you will be amazed at the
political power an individual can still wield in America's diminished
democracy.

Something else is also new this summer. Three years ago, in these pages,
I criticized the seeming diffidence of President Obama toward the great
task of solving the climate crisis; this summer, it is abundantly
evident that he has taken hold of the challenge with determination and
seriousness of purpose.

He has empowered his Environmental Protection Agency to enforce
limits on CO2 emissions for both new and, as of this June, existing
sources of CO2. He has enforced bold new standards for the fuel economy
of the U.S. transportation fleet. He has signaled that he is likely to
reject the absurdly reckless Keystone XL-pipeline proposal for the
transport of oil from carbon­intensive tar sands to be taken to market
through the United States on its way to China, thus effectively limiting
their exploitation. And he is even now preparing to impose new limits
on the release of methane pollution.

All of these welcome steps forward have to be seen, of course, in the
context of Obama's continued advocacy of a so-called all-of-the-above
energy policy – which is the prevailing code for aggressively pushing
more drilling and fracking for oil and gas. And to put the good news in
perspective, it is important to remember that U.S. emissions – after
declining for five years during the slow recovery from the Great
Recession – actually increased by 2.4 percent in 2013.

Nevertheless, the president is clearly changing his overall policy
emphasis to make CO2 reductions a much higher priority now and has made a
series of inspiring speeches about the challenges posed by climate
change and the exciting opportunities available as we solve it. As a
result, Obama will go to the United Nations this fall and to Paris at
the end of 2015 with the credibility and moral authority that he lacked
during the disastrous meeting in Copenhagen four and a half years ago.

The international treaty process has been so fraught with seemingly
intractable disagreements that some parties have all but given up on the
possibility of ever reaching a meaningful treaty.

Ultimately, there must be one if we are to succeed. And there are
signs that a way forward may be opening up. In May, I attended a
preparatory session in Abu Dhabi, UAE, organized by United Nations
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to bolster commitments from governments,
businesses and nongovernmental organizations ahead of this September's
U.N. Climate Summit. The two-day meeting was different from many of the
others I have attended. There were welcome changes in rhetoric, and it
was clear that the reality of the climate crisis is now weighing on
almost every nation. Moreover, there were encouraging reports from
around the world that many of the policy changes necessary to solve the
crisis are being adopted piecemeal by a growing number of regional,
state and city governments.

For these and other reasons, I believe there is a realistic hope that
momentum toward a global agreement will continue to build in September
and carry through to the Paris negotiations in late 2015.

The
American poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, "After the final 'no' there
comes a 'yes'/And on that 'yes' the future world depends." There were
many no's before the emergence of a global consensus to abolish chattel
slavery, before the consensus that women must have the right to vote,
before the fever of the nuclear­arms race was broken, before the
quickening global recognition of gay and lesbian equality, and indeed
before every forward advance toward social progress. Though a great many
obstacles remain in the path of this essential agreement, I am among
the growing number of people who are allowing themselves to become more
optimistic than ever that a bold and comprehensive pact may well emerge
from the Paris negotiations late next year, which many regard as the
last chance to avoid civilizational catastrophe while there is still
time.

It will be essential for the United States and other major historical
emitters to commit to strong action. The U.S. is, finally, now
beginning to shift its stance. And the European Union has announced its
commitment to achieve a 40-percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.
Some individual European nations are acting even more aggressively,
including Finland's pledge to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050.

It will also be crucial for the larger developing and emerging
nations – particularly China and India – to play a strong leadership
role. Fortunately, there are encouraging signs. China's new president,
Xi Jinping, has launched a pilot cap-and-trade system in two cities and
five provinces as a model for a nationwide cap-and-trade program in the
next few years. He has banned all new coal burning in several cities and
required the reporting of CO2 emissions by all major industrial
sources. China and the U.S. have jointly reached an important agreement
to limit another potent source of global-warming pollution – the
chemical compounds known as hydro-fluorocarbons, or HFCs. And the new
prime minister of India, as noted earlier, has launched the world's most
ambitious plan to accelerate the transition to solar electricity.

Underlying this new breaking of logjams in international politics,
there are momentous changes in the marketplace that are exercising
enormous influence on the perceptions by political leaders of the new
possibilities for historic breakthroughs. More and more, investors are
diversifying their portfolios to include significant investments in
renewables. In June, Warren Buffett announced he was ready to double
Berkshire Hathaway's existing $15 billion investment in wind and solar
energy.

A growing number of large investors – including pension funds,
university endowments (Stanford announced its decision in May), family
offices and others – have announced decisions to divest themselves from
carbon­intensive assets. Activist and "impact" investors are pushing for
divestment from carbon­rich assets and new investments in renewable and
sustainable assets.

Several large banks and asset managers around the world (full
disclosure: Generation Investment Management, which I co-founded with
David Blood and for which I serve as chairman, is in this group) have
advised their clients of the danger that carbon assets will become "stranded."
A "stranded asset" is one whose price is vulnerable to a sudden decline
when markets belatedly recognize the truth about their underlying value
– just as the infamous "subprime mortgages" suddenly lost their value
in 2007 to 2008 once investors came to grips with the fact that the
borrowers had absolutely no ability to pay off their mortgages.

Shareholder activists and public campaigners have pressed
carbon-dependent corporations to deal with these growing concerns. But
the biggest ones are still behaving as if they are in denial. In May
2013, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson responded to those pointing out the
need to stop using the Earth's atmosphere as a sewer by asking, "What
good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?"

I don't even know where to start in responding to that statement, but
here is a clue: Pope Francis said in May, "If we destroy creation,
creation will destroy us. Never forget this."

Exxonmobil,
Shell and many other holders of carbon-intensive assets have argued, in
essence, that they simply do not believe that elected national leaders
around the world will ever reach an agreement to put a price on carbon
pollution.

But a prospective global treaty (however likely or unlikely you think
that might be) is only one of several routes to overturning the
fossil-fuel economy. Rapid technological advances in renewable energy
are stranding carbon investments; grassroots movements are building
opposition to the holding of such assets; and new legal restrictions on
collateral flows of pollution – like particulate air pollution in China
and mercury pollution in the U.S. – are further reducing the value of
coal, tar sands, and oil and gas assets.

In its series of reports to energy investors this spring, Citigroup
questioned the feasibility of new coal plants not only in Europe and
North America, but in China as well. Although there is clearly a
political struggle under way in China between regional governments
closely linked to carbon-­energy generators, suppliers and users and the
central government in Beijing – which is under growing pressure from
citizens angry about pollution – the nation's new leadership appears to
be determined to engineer a transition toward renewable energy. Only
time will tell how successful they will be.

The stock exchanges in Johannesburg and São Paulo have decided to
require the full integration of sustainability from all listed
companies. Standard & Poor's announced this spring that some nations
vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis may soon have their
bonds downgraded because of the enhanced risk to holders of those
assets.

A growing number of businesses around the world are implementing
sustainability plans, as more and more consumers demand a more
responsible approach from businesses they patronize. Significantly, many
have been pleasantly surprised to find that adopting efficient,
low-carbon approaches can lead to major cost savings.

And all the while, the surprising and relentless ongoing decline in
the cost of renewable energy and efficiency improvements are driving the
transition to a low-carbon economy.

Is there enough time? Yes. Damage has been done, and the period of
consequences will continue for some time to come, but there is still
time to avoid the catastrophes that most threaten our future. Each of
the trends described above – in technology, business, economics and
politics – represents a break from the past. Taken together, they add up
to genuine and realistic hope that we are finally putting ourselves on a
path to solve the climate crisis.

How long will it take? When Martin Luther King Jr. was asked that
question during some of the bleakest hours of the U.S. civil rights
revolution, he responded, "How long? Not long. Because no lie can live
forever. . . . How long? Not long. Because the arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends toward justice."